Erik Luntang | Photojournalist | Photographer | Press | Diplomatic | EU | Video | Multimedia | Brussels

Meeting Erik Luntang, a multi-skilled photojournalist

Text: Claire Huysegoms

Erik Luntang is a Danish photojournalist who lives in Brussels and works for EUP-Images and INSPIRIT. He focuses his interest in taking photographs of politics, but also in multimedia, and in eco-friendly communication. This very passionate creator accepted to be under the scope.

One week after graduating in Photojournalism in Denmark, Erik Luntang went to Brussels with photo equipment, an old photo-transmitter and no money, but a landlord waiting for him with a free office room. “You pay rent when you start earning money” he said! 17 years later, Erik Luntang is still in Brussels and loves his job.

More specifically, Erik Luntang works for the EUP-Images, a picture agency covering Europe for European media and for INSPIRIT International Communications, in the department for photo and multimedia. This photographer is very interesting because he has opinions about a lot of debated subjects like politics, languages, sustainable communication and journalism. His experience makes him high skilled in different fields. In his mind, “Brussels should maybe accept English like as official language”, he observes that “In the majority, people come in Brussels for the European Institutions, not for Brussels”.

Those topics were on the table during our interview, in the office of Erik Luntang, which is in front of the European Commission Headquarters. With his big blue Nordic eyes, he has a perfect view on what’s going on there. It should be stressed that European politics are one of his favorite subjects to take photographs, but, “It was better in the past. Leterme is now a boring character. I prefer taking pictures of Verhofstadt!” he says with a great sense of humor. Erik Luntang’s office is a creative open space where you can find a piano, a photography atelier and a lot of different stuffs such as an old camera working with fax, books, old photographies of his past jobs. A real nice museum!

Enumerating the jobs that this great creator has done would take a day. Indeed, Erik Luntang has done a lot of amazing photographs, but also websites, and TV-stories. He covered for example conflicts in the Baltic States, Russia, Israel, EU-summits across Europe, but also big international sports events like the Football World Cup in France in 1998. He always has been passionate about new technologies. Furthermore, the Danish photographer was one of the first in Belgium to use digital camera in 1995. Now he is still a free-lance photographer for many Nordic newspapers and magazines, and governmental organizations. He is also now involved in a project, at INSPIRIT, to use less paper in communication production. , “To be sustainable is also not always look at what is cheapest. Because the cheapest can in fact actually be low quality and more expensive.”, he explains.

The very trendy solution of INSPIRIT is to better target the needs of the users. “When you have a financial crisis you have to be damned good! If you’re not creative, you can forget it. Our clients have to believe that what we are doing is the best ever done in the world.”, he claims. Erik Luntang has also some solutions for the future of journalism and photojournalism. According to him, people have to invest in journalism, and give to the readers and listeners better quality, maybe through sponsoring newspapers, because “People are not stupid. They see when there is a bad picture or article.”, argues the photographer.

Erik Luntang plans to stays in Brussels for at least several years. He actually continues to educate himself with courses on multimedia for instance, to do a better job. He recently went to the U.S. to observe the trends there.

So it would appear that Erik Luntang is definitely a skilled and passionate photographer who looks critically at our society. But over and above that, he works with his own claimed values: “Things can be done differently, communicated not in a commercial way, but as honestly as possible, in a journalistic way.”.

C.H.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 18:02 and is filed under Grumpytorial and tagged with culture, people, photography, social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.